DanMargarita.com

Fans of TV Land may have noticed promos for some of their new reality shows such as “High School Reunion” which gathers together members of a high school class from 1987, including “the jock, the popular girl, the stud, the bully and the geek.” My question is, if you don’t care about what became of those particular people from your own high school, why would you care about people you’ve never met?

With nearly 60 years of network programming available, can’t they find enough quality shows to fill their time slots? It seems to me that the whole premise of TV Land was to show quality entertainment that took middle-aged people back to a time when TV was good and clean; a time of innocence from our youth when all things seemed possible and we hadn’t yet had a chance to screw up our lives and wonder “where it all went wrong.”

One TV Land show is “I Pity The Fool” which you can probably guess by the title, stars Mr. T. I think the full title of this show should be “I Pity The Fool…Who Is So Starved For Entertainment They’re Reduced To Watching This Crap.” It’s the one show that the network website doesn’t even bother to provide a synopsis for, meaning that even they probably don’t think very highly of it.

Another show that’s advertised a lot is “The Big 4-0” where various people are shown celebrating their 40th birthday. This is a TV show? Unless they’re celebrating their 40th birthday by breaking into Fort Knox, creating peace in the Middle East or finding a cure for male pattern baldness, I’m not interested.

There’s “She’s Got The Look” about gorgeous women over 35 getting a chance to be a supermodel (which means they have the ability to leap tall catwalks in a single bound?) once again. It’s great to see some women who aren’t ridiculously skinny 19-year-olds get a chance at modeling, but I suspect that alternate choices for a title might have been “She’s Got The Stretch Marks” or “She’s Got The Cellulite.”

The other network which has really disappointed me lately is The History Channel which seems to rely more and more on programming that revolves around Bigfoot and/or aliens. What do these have to do with history? Okay, if Bigfoot or aliens had been at the Alamo or the Battle of Bunker Hill, or affected the outcome of the Boer War, then you’ve got a history story. If these are history subjects, I should ask my father, renowned Stoneham High School history teacher Bob Margarita, why we never studied “aliens” in his class.

The History Channel website lists 25 titles under the categories of “UFO Files” and “UFO Hunters.” Conversely, there are just six titles under the category of “Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War.”

The last title under the “UFO Hunters” category is listed as “USO’s.” I’m not sure if that’s a misspelling of if they’re implying that there’s some question as to whether or not the USO really exists. Were our troops waiting to be deployed overseas being given imaginary coffee and doughnuts by imaginary USO workers?

The network isn’t solely limited to UFO’s, of course. They have a category called “Monster Quest” which features titles such as “Mutant Canines,” “The Real Hobbit” and “Russia’s Killer Apemen.” Once upon a time, they were known as the KGB.

There are a few shows revolving around a series of recent incidents over the skies of Texas. People have claimed to see machines flying overhead with bright lights. If I had to guess, I’d say they probably were over Crawford, Texas and had markings that read things like “KTEX TV,” “U.S. Air Force” and “The United States Of America.”

Sadly, these networks have fallen into the trap of keeping up with the major networks that have come to rely heavily on reality shows for their programming. That simply reflects the world we live in where anyone can create their own TV show, like the disturbing story of the high school cheerleaders who beat up one of their own and then posted it on Youtube. Sure, if they had been in uniform and done that in Jello, it would’ve still been disturbing but at least a little hot.

I wonder if 40 years from now a middle-aged person will sit down in front of a TV (if they still exist) and fondly watch a rerun of their favorite show from their youth and have it be “The Big 4-0.”

I pity the fool.